User:SydneePEdmonds/Martha Ballard

Article Draft
In addition to these changes depicted here, I also deleted a large section of the original page that summarized the book instead of focusing on her work.

Lead
Martha Moore Ballard (1735 – May 1812) was an American midwife and healer. Unusually for the time, Ballard kept a diary that served as both a personal record of her interactions in Hallowell, but also as an almanac of sorts. Her diary was filled with thousands of entries over nearly three decades, which has provided historians with invaluable insight into frontier-women's lives. Ballard was made famous by the publication of A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1990.

^^^Early Life
and Family == Martha Moore was born in Oxford, Province of Massachusetts, on February 9, 1735, to the family of Elijah Moore and Dorothy Learned Moore. ^^^^ There is very little known about her childhood and education before she began keeping her diary====, but it is known that her family had medical links. These being her uncle Abijah Moore and brother-in-law Stephen Barton who were both physicians. ^^^^^In addition, her family is linked to^^^ Clara Barton,  ===founder of the American Red Cross and granddaughter of Ballard's sister, Dorothy Barton=====. She married Ephraim Ballard, ^^^^a land surveyor ====, in 1754. The couple had nine children between 1756 and 1779, but lost three of them to a diphtheria epidemic in Oxford between June 17 and July 5, 1769.

^^^^^^Midwifery & Medical History
== Ballard never received any formal medical training, but her methods of treating local maladies seem to have been a culmination of her experience as a colonial women. She was, in many ways, an herbalist. She harvested herbs, creating teas, salves, syrups and vapors in order to treat anything from a cough to an aching limb. This type of medicine was practiced often by women as they were not allowed to attend medical school. Thus, books such as The Compleat Housewife: OR, Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion accompanied many women in their daily medical tasks. Ballard never mentions any such books in her writing, implying she must have gained her medical knowledge through her life's experience as opposed to education.

Ballard delivered 816 babies over the 27 years that she wrote her diary and was present at more than 1,000 births; the mortality rates of infants and mothers that she visited were ordinary for the United States before the 1940s. Her diary also recorded her administering medicines and remedies, which she made herself mostly from local plants and occasionally from ingredients bought from a local physician. Ballard was sometimes called to observe autopsies and recorded 85 instances of what she called "desections" in her diary. She also took testimonies from unwed mothers that was used in paternity suits. She testified in 1789 in a high-profile case of a judge accused of raping a minister's wife. In addition to her medical and judicial responsibilities, Ballard frequently carried out tasks such as trading, weaving, and social visits. She and her family experienced difficult times during 1803–1804, when her husband was imprisoned for debt and her son was indicted for fraud. Ballard's obituary was published on June 9, 1812 in the American Advocate and simply stated: "Died in Augusta, Mrs Martha, consort of Mr Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years."^^^ moved this up to the life section===

^^^^^Legal Context
== In addition to aiding in births and illnesses, the time that she spent with patients was often used in the local court systems as expert testimony. Martha Ballard served as a witness in the trial of Judge Joseph North in 1789. In this case, Rebecca Foster, the wife of a local minster, Issac Foster, claimed to have been brutally "ravisht" by a local judge of Hallowell. At first not believing her due to the social standing of the judge, Ballard began to serve as a witness for the case, providing crucial contextual evidence to the validity of Foster's accusation. Foster began to confide in Ballard, reporting her fear of the abuses by the local men. In her diary, Ballard writes that "shee [Rebecca] had received great abuses from people unknown to her," and even experienced groups of men throwing rocks at the windows of her home. Ballard was not one for judgement or gossip about the goings on in Hallowell so it out of character for her when Ulrich writes that it was “the great surprise” when Judge North was acquitted. This trial was a significant event for the tiny town of Hallowell and was born out of dislike for Mr. Issac Foster due to his unorthodox preaching style and religious history. In the event of Rebecca Foster’s rape and accusation of the Colonel Judge North, the town inevitably turned their backs on the family, resulting in their flight from Hallowell shortly after the trial. The occurrence and sentiment around the trial of Mrs. Foster follows very closely to the way in which many rape trials at the time were treated. If reported, these women's cases were largely ignored or treated with disdain, so much so that there were popular satirical plays made about cases of sexual assault. One of the most notable of these, "The Trial of Atticus, Before Justice Beau" was published in 1771 in Boston and was used to mock Rebecca Foster at the time of her trial.

Additionally, she often weighed in on paternity cases in Hallowell. Under a 1668 Massachusetts law, Midwives were often asked to pressure young unwed mothers into naming the father of her child in the throes of labor, an action which Ballard frequently participated in. Ulrich notes that "for thirteen of the twenty" out of wedlock births Ballard had attended she had ""taken testimony"" of the father in accordance with the laws. It appears that these records were not taken to shame women for participating in premarital sex, but more so to prevent the state from having to support children with unknown parentage.